The Debacle - Emile Zola [136]
‘Filthy swine!’
But the officer had raised his sword, and the two men fell like logs, the gardener face to the ground and the other, the accounts clerk, on his side along the wall. Before expiring he had a final convulsion, his eyelids flickered and his mouth twitched. The officer came up and turned him over with his foot to make sure he was not still alive.
Henriette had seen it all, the dying eyes looking for her, the dreadful spasm of his end, the heavy boot kicking his corpse. She even stopped screaming, but silently, furiously, bit whatever she could, a hand her teeth came up against. The Bavarian uttered a cry of intense pain, flung her down and nearly knocked her out. Their faces touched, and she was never to forget that red beard and hair flecked with blood, those blue eyes staring and mad with rage.
Later Henriette could not clearly remember what had happened next. She had had only one desire, to go back to her husband’s body, take it away and watch over it. But as in a nightmare one obstacle after another sprang up and stopped her every move. A fresh and violent fusillade had broken out and a great deal of manoeuvring took place among the German troops occupying Bazeilles: it was the arrival at long last of the Marines, and the fight began again so fiercely that she was thrown back down an alley to the left with a mob of panic-stricken inhabitants. In any case the outcome of the struggle could not be in doubt, for it was too late to recapture the abandoned positions. For nearly another half-hour the Marines fought doggedly on and gave their lives with superb dash, but the enemy was continually being reinforced from every side, the meadows, the roads, the park of Montvillers. Nothing could now dislodge them from the village they had bought at such a price, where thousands of their men lay in blood and flames. Destruction was now completing its work, and nothing was left but a charnel-house of scattered limbs and smoking ruins. Bazeilles, murdered, demolished, was disappearing into ashes.
Henriette caught one last glimpse of her little home where the floors were falling into a whirlpool of fire. Opposite, she could still see her husband’s body lying by the wall. Then a fresh wave caught her again, the bugles were sounding the retreat and she was carried along somehow in the midst of the fleeing troops. She just became an object, a piece of flotsam washed along in a swirling stream of people flowing along the road. She lost any idea of what was happening until she found herself in Balan, in somebody’s kitchen, where she was sobbing with her head on a table.
5
AT ten o’clock up on the plateau of Algérie Beaudoin’s company was still lying among the cabbages, not having moved from that field since first thing. The cross-fire from the batteries of Le Hattoy and the Iges peninsula was increasing in intensity and had just killed two more of their men, and still no order to advance. Were they going to spend all day there, to be shot down without a fight?
And now the men had not even the relief of letting off their own rifles. Captain Beaudoin had managed to stop the firing, a furious and pointless fusillade against the little wood opposite, in which not a single Prussian seemed to have stayed. The sun was scorching and they were baked alive, lying like this on the ground under a blazing sky.
Jean turned round and saw with alarm that Maurice had let his head fall on the ground, his cheek was against the earth and his eyes shut. His face was white and still.
‘Hallo, what’s up?’
It simply was that Maurice had gone to sleep. The waiting and his exhaustion had knocked him out even though death was hovering all round. He woke up with a start, opened wide, serene eyes which at once took on again the frightened, haunted expression of battle. He never knew how long he had been asleep. He felt he was emerging from a timeless, delicious nothingness.
‘Fancy, isn’t that funny, I’ve been